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Overcoming Bitterness, Finding Forgiveness

By Jeanne Jess

Old resentments make us feel bitter, and bitterness can make the most beautiful people appear ugly. Resentment toward others is the opposite of forgiveness. It blocks the free flow of Divine Love in all directions.

The ego loves being right, as we all know. Being right is more important than being happy and at peace, as the ego teaches. I was there, more than I would like to admit.

I was so good at judging others! Blaming others! I was good at the wonderful game of playing the poor victim. How my ego loved to get all that attention from others in the role of victim.

Sooner or later, all that anger and bitterness brought more issues and losses into my life, and left no room for love.

Bitterness, with vengeance justified and mercy lost, condemns you as unworthy of forgiveness. The unforgiven have no mercy to bestow upon another. That is why your sole responsibility must be to take forgiveness for yourself. (A Course in Miracles, TX 25.86)

Then one day I realized: I have to make a new choice if I want to experience true love. It was time for me to “wake up,” stop the blame game, and lay aside that old victim role once for all. This is when I was ready to write a new script for my life and open up to God’s love.

Bitterness is to your heart what the ego has been to your mind. It is the one false idea that has entered this holiest of places, this abode of Christ, this bridge between the human and the divine. It exists not in some but in all, as the ego has existed not in some but in all. Like the ego, it has not caused you to be unlovable or unrecognizable. But it has become, like the ego, so much a part of your reality that it must, like the ego, be consciously left behind. (A Course of Love, T3:6.5)

You know those moments when someone says a few words that shake you awake? When a few words stay with you forever? I will always remember that unique meditation teacher who told me: “That is right, it seems unfair, I hear you. But did you ever ask if maybe you did something similar to them in one of your past lifetimes? Therefore maybe all of these situations had to do with some old karma?”

In that moment I was speechless. His words had answered my lifelong question about why certain things with certain people had happened in my life. His suggestion was just one of many possible answers to the question of why certain things happen in our lives. I do not claim this to be necessarily true. But somehow his answer allowed me to step into acceptance of what happened. I was finally able to let it go.

From that new place of acceptance, I was able to forgive others and to forgive myself. Of course, I did not do these steps alone, I did them with the help of my Holy Spirit and the steps of the atonement.

Today I no longer feel the way I felt in the past. Yes, I really feel peace, and those memories have somehow changed. I came to realize that when I was young I spent years blaming those people. But with this new suggestion from that teacher, and with those steps of the atonement from A Course in Miracles, something really changed, and I feel very grateful for it.

Was it old unconscious guilt from previous lifetimes that made me attract those people to attack and hurt me when I was a kid? Maybe. I learned that the ego uses unconscious feelings of guilt—due to our false belief in separation from God—to make us feel unworthy of God’s love and blessings. Guilt makes us feel unworthy of all good things in life. It creates the self-sabotage patterns we sometimes have. The ego tries everything to hinder us from accepting our true divine oneness.

This is how I understood another level of the teachings of Jesus, and I feel grateful for these precious steps of healing. Whereas before I was only reading about the steps of atonement, I now began to apply them to all kind of similar situations in my daily life. The more I do them, the more I observe a feeling of inner peace in my heart.

Bring bitterness no longer to the dwelling place of Christ and we will seal the place of its entrance with the sweetness of love so that bitterness will be no more. (ACOL, T3:6.6)

Sometimes it is truly like a miracle happening, even the same day. One morning I asked Holy Spirit for the atonement for a certain situation. Less than five hours later, in the afternoon, I received an unexpected phone call from a person who gave me good news about that same situation, with a wonderful solution even better than I thought possible. I was so relieved and grateful.